April 22 (Bloomberg) -- Natalia Watkins, a 40-year-old Hong
Kong-based executive for HSBC Holdings Plc, knows about
endurance. Last month she flew to the Arctic, ditched her
BlackBerry and raced on foot over frozen snow hauling a gear-piled sled for 67 hours with only six hours of sleep.

With temperatures on the Canadian tundra of minus 40
Celsius (minus 40 Fahrenheit) requiring three pairs of gloves,
even a one-minute break necessitated careful planning to avoid
frostbite and hypothermia on the 120-mile (193-kilometer)
expanse of whiteness in the 6633 Extreme Winter Ultra Marathon,
she said.

“A lot of thoughts went through my mind -- that I was
going to be found freezing to death and half eaten by a wolf,”
said Watkins, a 5-foot-4-inch (1.63-meter) U.K. native who heads
the bank’s Asia-Pacific derivatives clearing services.

More and more women like Watkins are signing up for ultra-distance endurance races in extreme environments, testing the
grit, determination and focus they’ve used to make inroads into
usually male-dominated industries like finance.

Called ultra because these races go beyond the standard
marathon length of 26.2 miles, they include competitions such as
the Extreme Winter race, named 6633 for the latitude of the
Arctic Circle, which the runners cross. Watkins was the only
woman among nine people to finish the race that drew 26
entrants, including four women.

Last year, 71 women completed at least one of the three
annual 250-kilometer desert races through the Sahara in Egypt,
Atacama in Chile and parts of China’s Xinjiang province. There
were 65 percent more female finishers than in 2006, the first
year the contests took place in the same year, according to Hong
Kong-based organizer RacingThePlanet Ltd.

Growing Fast

“Interestingly, the number of women living in Asia taking
part in our events and ultramarathons overall seems to be
growing much faster than in Europe and North America,” said
RacingThePlanet founder Mary Gadams, an ultramarathoner and
former investment banker herself, citing the availability of
child care and domestic help.

Female participation in the 78-kilometer Swiss Alpine
Marathon has increased by 6 percentage points since 1998 to 16
percent in 2011, according to academic research published in
Open Access Journal of Sports Medicine last July.

“I like doing races when you don’t know that you can
finish,” said Watkins, back in the air-conditioned comfort of
HSBC’s iconic building in Hong Kong after the race that began
March 22. “You have to treat all of these races with great
respect.”

Other Extreme

Having raced where temperatures hit 45 degrees Celsius,
Watkins said she chose the 6633 to experience the other extreme.
The race bills itself as “the toughest, coldest, windiest ultra
on the planet” and includes an option to continue for an
additional 230 miles. It starts from Eagle Plains in the
Canadian Yukon and goes to Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic Ocean along
the crushed-stone Dempster Highway. Most of Watkins’ ultra-running friends considered even the 120-mile short course crazy,
she said.

Progress becomes a science in that extreme environment.
Participants do the “polar plod,” a steady pace to keep from
excessive sweating that could precipitate hypothermia during a
break, Watkins said.

Two other Hong Kong-based, financial-industry women who
have taken up ultramarathon running are Nora Senn, an insurance
broker with Lockton Companies (Hong Kong) Ltd., and Emily
Woodland, the only Hong Kong-based female fund manager at UBS
O’Connor LLC, the $6 billion hedge-fund unit of Switzerland’s
largest bank.

Mt. Fuji

Senn, a 36-year-old Swiss national, was the third-fastest
woman in last year’s inaugural Ultra-Trail Mt. Fuji. More than
28 percent of starters failed to complete the 156-kilometer
course around Japan’s highest mountain within the 46-hour time
limit. With 9,000 meters of cumulative elevation gains, more
than twice the altitude difference between Mt. Everest’s base
camps and its summit, the event is being held April 26-28. Senn
plans to race again, in the 85-kilometer short course.

Senn trains two to three hours a day during the work week
plus five to six hours a day on the weekend, fitting sessions
into lunch hours and before and after work. At the height of her
training for a big race, she runs as many as 75 miles a week.

“I like the word ‘play,’” Senn said. “I go out and
relax.”

Senn won the women’s category of the 2012 Vibram Hong Kong
100, a 100-kilometer race across the city. Last month, she
emerged as the women’s champion in the 98-kilometer Raidlight
Lantau100, held on the mountainous island where Hong Kong
International Airport is located. It was her first ultramarathon
since taking four months off to recover from an injury.

Passing Moments

Woodland, a Lancashire, U.K., native and Watkins’ sometimes
weekend training partner, was the fourth-fastest woman and 17th
overall finisher last year among 163 men and women who competed
in the 250-kilometer Gobi March race, which is held in and
around the Gobi desert. The annual event in northwestern China’s
Xinjiang province, where the temperature can surge above 40
degrees Celsius, was her debut solo ultramarathon.

“When it comes to ultras, every race can be your best or
worst race,” Woodland said. “Within that kind of distance, you
get to experience the best highs in the world and the worst lows
in the world. With practice, you just know that those moments
will pass.”

Cramped Quarters

All three women took up ultra-running after moving to Hong
Kong, where on average 6,540 people must share a single square
kilometer (0.4 square mile) of land. Their previous exercise
routines, including jogging along roadsides or horseback-riding,
became less appealing or even inviable, all three women said.

Watkins supplements her 60-miles-a-week running schedule by
sometimes waking up at 5:30 a.m. to squeeze in a gym session
before work. At the end of her 11-hour work day, she regularly
swaps her power suit for compression tights for a 7.5-mile run
over Hong Kong’s hills to do more conference calls from home.
Her weekly mileage peaked at 93 miles before the 6633 race.

“Like everyone, I rely on my BlackBerry to be contacted at
all times, including to make evening conference calls,” she
said, adding that the phone came with her to Canada. “However
on the race itself I didn’t take it. There was no access to
electricity, batteries don’t last at those temperatures, and
there’s no reception anyway.”

Woodland said she gets cabin fever sitting in an air-conditioned room staring at four computer screens for as many as
13 hours a day.

‘Really Therapeutic’

“I find it really, really therapeutic to just go out there
and escape the world,” said Woodland, who has time for only 10
hours of training per week, including spinning classes, weight
training and yoga at the gym. “It helps clear my head of a lot
of things.”

On weekends, she runs as many as 60 kilometers, she said.
One big draw of ultra-racing has been the people she meets.

“There’s a very different mentality from other competitive
sports, and people are a lot more humble,” Woodland said.
“Ultra-running is probably the world’s least-glamorous sport.
You bond over things like chafing, blisters.”

Watkins remembers being “spoon-fed” by tent mates during
her Gobi March race in 2011, in which about 10 competitors of
both sexes from various nations shared a tent for a week without
showers. Competitors live on instant noodles, freeze-dried food
and whatever necessities can fit into a backpack weighing less
than 12 kilograms (26.5 pounds). The assistance helped her avoid
being forced to withdraw from the event, she said, though she
lost 6.5 kilograms. She finished in just over 58 hours, ranking
96th out of 116 finishers and 31 dropouts.

Rising Popularity

Increasing women’s participation in ultramarathons has
taken place against a backdrop of rapidly rising popularity of
the sport in general. Finishers in RacingThePlanet’s annual
desert races through China, Chile and Egypt jumped 59 percent
between 2006 and last year. Women as a percentage of finishers
edged up less than 1 percentage point because of the higher
number of entrants as a whole.

In last year’s Hong Kong 100, the 1.62-meter Senn defeated
95 percent of the men. None of the women say that either winning
or beating men is the main objective. Yet if Senn senses an
attitude among male competitors that women can’t do as well as
men, she said she’s happy to show them she’s faster.

“If it’s people that have a very strong idea that they
don’t want to be chicked by a girl, I will do my part,” Senn
said.